HEAR THE THUNDER, FEEL THE RAIN

This undecorated calumet appears jointed, like bamboo.

It might have been adapted from a walking stick.

“Calumets” are far from exclusive to the Blackfeet, but the Amskapi Pikuni had their own versions, as did many of the Plains Indian tribes.

“Calumet is a Norman word (pronounced: [kalyme]), first recorded in David Ferrand's La Muse normande around 1625–1655.  Its first meaning was "sort of reeds used to make pipes", with a suffix substitution for calumel. It corresponds to the French word chalumeau, meaning 'reeds' (Modern French also means 'straw', 'blowlamp').The term was used by Norman-French settlers in Canada to describe the ceremonial pipes they saw used among the First Nations people of the region.”

This bare calumet has been smoked.  

Ours had the same cross-section shape.

“Peace pipe” is another misnomer that emerged from movies and novels.  But certainly peace or a truce is one of the uses of a tobacco pipe (around here normally smoking kinnikinnick but sometimes “twist” tobacco if it can be found).  Esp. for older folks, it’s a soother and an energizer at once, a function of nicotine.  Also, it is a ceremonial implement on first meetings to give people a chance to settle and adjust to each other.  Some cultures use cups of tea or coffee or alcohol.  

This sort of information is just facts.  More interesting is the accumulation of the “Bundle” that was wrapped up with  a Thunder Pipe Bundle along with the felt meanings of the people on the prairies in the spring when the thunderstorms raked the land, just as they are doing today, May 26.  North American Indian Days is a formal modern festival pow-wow with all the giveaways and family business that need to be done, but it is late, AFTER the thunderstorms in July.  This is because Agent Campbell persuaded them to cut hay first, THEN have the ceremonies. 

In those days it was clear that the people couldn’t come together until there was enough grass and water for their horses.  Some agents tried to suppress any such gathering, even the ones by the recent post-Civil War Indian school grads who wanted to convene scholarly discussion.  The white agents were afraid that any gathering would be a plot. If you really want an authentic version of a Bundle Opening, go to "The Old North Trail", which includes photos and instructions of the event around 1900, all by Walter McClintock, who came as a friend every summer. 

I want to talk about the experience, but it’s necessary to give a little background.  The calumet itself is studded with brass tacks.  Smooth and straight, it seems to have been drilled on a rifling lathe.  Our “Thunder Pipe Bundle” and it has a proper pedigree, which was oral when we got it and then was written down and notarized by Wilber Werner, a staunch Catholic who -- I suspect -- thought the ceremony was a naive version of the Mass.  

The Green Parrot

Many of the pipes have a whole bird affixed to the top and ours had a green parrot with taxidermy eyes.  Another rather famous pipe had a colorful rooster on it.  These are not ancient sinew and bone artifacts -- they are mixes of European metal and methods with whatever might come to hand for a tribal person on the high prairie.  Knowing that, it seems likely that the association went from lightning strike danger (which was very real on the prairie) to the danger of battles on horseback and dwindling of the buffalo to a kind of reconciliation of material cultures in hope of finding a way forward.

The Scriver Thunder Pipe Bundle -- the decorated calumet

Unlike the ordinary pipes used for real smoking, the heart of the Pipe Bundle was a yard long and the stone bowl was in the Bundle but not attached.  Fanned and hanging under the calumet was the entire suite of an eagle’s tail feathers, each with its shaft decorated with beads or quills.  Mixed with them are white ermine skins and bright satin ribbons.  On top, at the end for drawing smoke, was the bright plumage of a colorful bird. Ours had a parrot with taxidermy eyes and another had a Harlequin duck with glass eyes.  We were told there was one called “The White Man Thunder Bundle” that sported an impressive rooster.  They were not perched or even stuffed as was fashionable in the 19^th century, but more like “study skins” that are kept in drawers for comparisons.  “Study skins” do not have eyes.

Near the “head” end of the calument is a handful of bells, sometimes “jinglebells” and sometimes falconry bells.  They are said to be the Pleiades or whatever the local mythologists made of the cluster of bells.  They show up as a pattern of circles on the smoke flap ears of lodges.   Another tube, the sawed off section of a rifle, decorated with ribbons and so on, is the “woman’s pipe.”  Another historical sign: this was added when the shooter had access to the gun and a hacksaw, but too early to just discard something so powerful as a section of gun barrel, so it was saved. 

This book was published by Bob Scriver through a "vanity publisher."

The rest is animal skins, preserved with handsful of tobacco.  Sometimes there will be iniskim, the little fossil stones that look like buffalo.  Bob documented our Bundle contents in “The Blackfeet: Artists of the Northern Plains.”  The illustrations of this post are from his book for which Marshall Noice, an artist, took the photos.  The implications of that will be the subject of a future post.

The Kicking Woman family opened their Bundle on Mother’s Day.  Molly, who was Canadian and from an observant family, was the one who really understood the preparations, including sarvisberry soup with its bitterroot inclusion, carrying on the theme of plenty in the face of want.  Like Lent, a ceremony in the thunderstorm season would be late for whatever food had been preserved in the winter, but early for summer’s plenty.  All the families who still had saved dried sarvisberries donated them for the one big pot of soup.  

George Kicking Woman, all dressed up.

Molly was the force behind George and, as the woman always was, the true Keeper in terms of managing it,  but George didn’t mind seeming a powerful patriarch as white visitors usually assumed.  He was a mild and earnest man, unlikely to kick anyone, but white people got a lot of mileage out of the name.  Bob and George were the same age.  George was the youngest of the Keepers at the ceremonies we attended.

What I’m describing happened fifty years ago.  Most people at an Opening were related, but many of them were likely to be from Canada where the old ways have persisted longer.  People were actually speaking their own language.  The smudge is lit in a dishpan of dirt.  Drummers were a “rawhide orchestra,” an assortment of men who knew the songs or can pick them up quickly, since they are a pattern based on a phrase that is meant to describe the particular animal with which it is associated.  Joe Old Chief was one of them and one of the last to "cross the horizon."  They used hand drums.  In the Beaver Bundle openings the drummers pounded on a dry rawhide with rattles.  The smudge was different as well.

Harlequin duck, augmented with pow-wow feathers.

This is from a Last Star bundle.

The Bundle is about the lives of the animals and their powers to help.  The man who is inspired to dance with one of them, takes it up in its funny swaddling of calico or headscarf, meant to keep it intact without shedding bits, and endeavors to dance in imitation of the living animal, moving it in front of him like a little boy making a toy car “go.”  The best dancers evoke the animal with uncanny imitation of its rhythms and wiggles, as though it were a puppet, but also “beconme the animal” with all the skill of dancing or acting.  The collection of animals is like a hymnal, a mnemonic device to act as a reminder of both animal and song.  

For those of us who had handled these animals and watched them out on the prairie or mountainsides they brought back moments and, as humans are “wired” to do, the mood of that memory, which made a kind of trance.   Bob and I had watched the animals as well as bringing them into the shop and skinning them for mounting, giving them glass eyes.  The “permission” to acquire a Bundle comes in a dream, and Bob had the dream.  It also requires a LOT of money, and Bob paid it.  Even if he weren’t paying for a transfer, he would slip hundreds of dollars to Molly a week or so ahead of time to help with the preparations.

The ceremony was a spiritual way to reconcile an individual with the community that had practical benefits for the community itself.  As each man chose an animal and danced with it briefly, his family and friends would stand in place to ululate in support.  Then they would “gift” money to someone in the circle to honor the dancer.  Most went to someone who had lost a family member or someone who was suffering.  The “orderly,” who kept the smudge going and passed the money to the designated recipient, was Young Jim Whitecalf, son of the Old Jim Whitecalf who so captured the imaginations of white outsiders that he's featured in two books.

Double-page spread in "The Blackfeet: Artists of the Northern Plains

In the portrait, which some call a diorama, of the Thunder Pipe Bundle, are the principals in the first ceremony Bob and I attended.  They posed and are recognizable, real people, except for Charlie Reevis, who was deceased.  George Kicking Woman was the youngest Bundle Keeper, the same age as Bob.  The man with the black face is Louis Plenty Treaty, the most spiritual man I ever met.  I used to say you could seat him in a Buddhist ceremony and he would be perfectly fitting.  The next is Tom Many Guns, who had been the Keeper of this Bundle just previously, but had been drinking a lot and selling bits of it to finance his addiction.  

In fact, we were startled to realize we’d been buying them, but pleased to put them back in.  Next, in a red wool jacket is Richard Little Dog who was the ceremonialist and technically the real owner -- that is, it had been transferred to him properly.  Nearest the camera in a Hudson’s Bay blanket capote is Joe Gambler, who was armed for posing and made the most of pantomiming attacks when posing got boring.

I don’t remember the names of all the four drummers.  I think Joe Old Chief and Joe Young Eagle were there.   The woman in blue, closest to the camera was Margaret Many Guns, who was originally Canadian.  She made my ceremonial clothes, including moccasins, which were very simple but meant to be exchanged with her clothes so that the “power” would recognize me and go with me after the exchange.  Next in pink is Mrs. Young Eagle and then Molly Kicking Woman.  I think the gray-haired woman was Mary Blackman.

These people are all gone now, but the ceremony has been reinstituted.  Like all memories, it is re-constituted, and as in all communities, it has somehow drifted from the hands of the most old-timey and observant people into the practices of the educated and relatively prosperous.  I’m smelling sweetgrass smudge (I grow a little), but you buy sweetgrass on the Internet now.  It’s hard to find on the prairie, poisoned out like most of the birds and animals in the Bundle.  The People are there, but they are changed.

CONTAINER: METAPHOR FOR WORSHIP

Mediterranean-based religious worship is based most deeply at the metaphor of the contained.  Since all religions are based on survival, both the individual and the group, and since food is so essential to survival, it is the domestication of grain and fruits ten thousand years ago that reified the idea of the container: the granary where food could be stored and the wall that protected the town against raids on the granary.  Accumulation of wealth in terms of food meant that some people could be freed to think about sacred issues, like fortunate crops and avoidance of disasters like volcano eruptions, and so they built temples, containers for their ceremonies, and palaces, containers for their leaders.  

By now speech was well-established but the invention of writing allowed a new “container,” the manuscript (not yet the codex form we call “book”) that contained ideas.  The people who revered books but could not read depended on leaders and priests who could.  The study of writing (both historical records and prescriptive rules) was considered a portal into the privileged enclosure that defined the wise and therefore those best able to guide the people past disaster.  This is the core of Jewish religious practice.  It is not suited to hunter-gatherer styles of worship which tend to be more directly sensory, often a re-enactment and dispersed in sympathy towards things that have their own lives rather than a leader, esp. a single powerful leader who controlled a town, its wall and its granary -- therefore its fate.  

Studying written wisdom ought to be a nourishment and can become an addiction.  Therefore, it is both bread and wine.  Often debate and discussion about learning proceeded at a communal meal, another deep metaphor-pattern for human behavior. When the Christian movement broke away from Judaism, it did not discard the study of scripture but eventually created a New Testament, partly Good News (gospel) and partly letters about communal life.  In the meantime, the Jewish-style study group was followed by a communal meal of the ordinary bread and wine brought pot-luck style.  It was this pot-luck, associated also with the ceremonial meals of Passover and scholars, that became communion when Jesus (at the Last Supper) asked the people to remember his coming sacrifice by taking bread as His Flesh and wine as His Blood.

Sacrifice is also a very early and deep concept for ceremony which was crucially shifting in the early days of the change from a hunting/gathering culture to one of agriculture.  The way of “sending” a sacrifice to whatever higher power or force might be propitiated was to burn it so that it rose and dispersed in smoke.  The smell of burnt flesh was thus pleasing to the gods.  The greater the generosity of the sacrifice, the more virtuous and effective.  Thus, a holocaust was the greatest generosity, since none of the sacrificed animal was kept to eat.  

But there were limits and one of them is the sacrifice of one’s children, so we have the story of Abraham ready to kill his son at God’s command, but then sparing him, also at God’s command.  This is echoed in the idea that God is willing to sacrifice HIS own son, but then spares him through ascension to heaven.  Some of this probably relates to the need for a leader, a king, who will not sacrifice his people.  (All of this is highly relevant to the world cultures today, some of whom are willing to kill or allow their people to die in various ways, ranging from gas attacks to famine to pencil-daggers like not funding health care or food support.)

Communion consisting of bread and wine both evoked family meals and reinvigorated the idea of God as a Father All powerful while also stepping away from the holocaust of living beings.  Scholars suggest that the story of Jacob and Esau addresses the change, so that Jacob is the agriculturalist and Esau is a hunter or pastoral herder who sacrifices his animals.  The story speaks to the inner anguish of the person whose most basic assumptions of what will keep him safe are destroyed.  Loss of heritage, rage, fear, and disinheritance.

So communion is a material embodiment of the people’s ordinary familiar meal but as a metaphor of safety and protection from God.  The more beautifully it is done, the more moving, but the essential center of breaking bread and sipping wine is sacred no matter what.  But what if the material culture is different?

This became highly relevant to Catholic missionaries going to indigenous peoples at other places on the planet.  What about the Chinese who take their wheat as noodles?  Can one have a Communion of noodles and tea?  What about the Inuit who never ate bread, never drank wine -- had no plants, lived on sea mammals.  Could one have a REAL flesh and REAL blood communion?  

Once the bread was stylized into unleavened wafers and blessed wine, it took on a specialness that verged on magic.  The idea that the bread actually became the real flesh of Jesus presented the philosophical problem called “misplaced concreteness” when a metaphor stops being a metaphor and becomes simply a reality in itself, but with magic powers which inhere in the object rather than what it stands for.  Communion is supposed to be a portal, a threshold, rather than a scientific medicine or technology.  When people began to try to heal wounds by applying Communion wafers, they were diminishing the metaphorical engagement into simple instruments.  

Anti-vampire kit

But there WERE ways to preserve and even enhance the meaning of Communion.  When a woman at a Catholic seminary where students served Communion every Friday was denied this opportunity, she served ceremonial bread and water, a traditional prison meal, so she technically was not serving Communion.  Water is as powerful a symbol as wine.  Baptism in the Western context also has meaning as birth, cleansing, conversion, and renewal.  Yet there are African cultures where water sprinkled on a woman’s head was thought to make her barren.  All metaphors of worship are rooted in the culture from which they arose.

Robert Schreiter in his book “Building Local Theology” explores all this in much depth as a real practical problem and also a key to the future of any culturally based metaphorical system given sacred connotation.  His message is that all humans have the same instincts for salvation in the most practical and concrete sense, so that their emotional concepts at the deepest level are always there, but reaching them means knowing them well-enough to understand what in their lives will express what Communion expresses.

When the Jesuits first came to the prairie indigenous tribes, they attended ceremonies and saw that the people at communal meals ate a kind of soup made of sarvisberries and buffalo fat.  They told the people it was Communion but it wasn’t.  Or maybe it was.  The first ceremonies in prairie life came in spring when the lowest places were blooming and the calves were coming.  After a winter of deprivation, these were the equivalent of the Easter feasts of egg and lamb.  

The last of the grain must be kept as seed and not eaten.  According to some, this is Lent.  The last of the dried berries can be eaten in soup as a presage of plenty to come and at the time of the earliest thunderstorms, the berry bushes are in bloom on which the berry crop depends.  Hail, a severe freeze, could mean a bad berry crop, competition with bears inclined to come into camp for food.  Safety and food entwine in what is sacred and ceremonial.  Berry soup is a communal meal that petitions for survival -- it just doesn’t have anything to do with Jesus.  Introducing bread where there were no ovens meant the use of fry bread, which is now seen as “Indian,” especially when fried in animal fat, and the introduction of wine turned out to be a very mixed blessing.

A contemporary ceremony of immanent meaning and generosity is a day when donated handmade ceramic bowls, ingenious and unique, are sold containing soup for lunch.  The profits then go to people on short rations.  When one buys the soup, one also gets the bowl.  This is so fitting a part of the material culture that it grows in popularity every year.  It is as valid as any other ceremony.